The last I
heard from her she had married a white man who worked at the same car
plant that

she
worked. She was a good woman. I didn’t do right by her and I am sorry
about it. So

I wasn’t
really sanctimonious about the problem with the credit card. Maybe it
was her

way of paying me back, of getting even,
for all the problems I had put her through . . .

Letters of an Abiding Faith:

Legacy of a Slave's GrandDaughter to
her Son

written by Ella Lewis to her Son
(Rudolph Lewis)

* * * * *

Letter 44

January 5, 1987

Dear Son,

Just a note to let you hear From me. I doing
better I had that Flue. I was so disappointed you diden Come home.
You Could have Wrote told me if you wasnt Coming. You Know how
much I Worry When I dont hear From you.*

It was nice Xmas. Quiet But nice. I coulden
Enjoy Because I thinking of you. Well in Case you rite me send it
to Lucinda address. I be up there For 3 or 4 weeks I guess. Her
address is 4420 Cedar Garden Road Baltimore MD 21229.

I hope you had a nice Xmas. I rite More When I
hear From you. All send love. Hope to hear From you soon.

Love Mother

* * * * *

Commentary

*These were lonely times for me. I don’t
recall what I did that Christmas. In January of 1987, I was still
in Baton Rouge at LSU. I do not believe I saw anyone during that
holiday -- neither Mona Lisa nor Ella Jean. I am sure I was very
depressed, just holding out. I had made no real friends at LSU. I
am sure, however, that I was busy with the Christian material. I
had just completed my first semester at LSU and wrote a paper on
the idioms used by Christian in his poems and the paper didn't go
over very well with one of my professors. I didn't like the
fellow, though he is quite well-known among scholars of black
literature. I think he might have become Mona Lisa's dissertation
advisor. He was quite fond of black women writers, like Zoa Neale
Hurston and Alice Walker. I believe, as a white professor, he was
quite uneasy around black males.

I don’t know whether I ever saw Ella Jean
again or not. I recall I made her a loan of money before I left
New Orleans to get her house fixed up. She sent me photos of every
room in the house. It was very pretty. I did not really expect the
money back and it didn’t matter. I am sure I talked to her again
on the phone December of 1987 or January of 1988 after I returned
to Baltimore. For she had committed credit card fraud. She had
faked my name and pretended she was my wife and had run up an
$1800 bill. I didn’t find out about it until I returned to
Baltimore.

My buddy Fred Mason was then working for Archway
Ford as a salesman and I had gotten a job with 1199 again. The
officers at 1199 thought my Volkswagon bug wasn’t the
appropriate kind of car for a union organizer. Fred decided to
sell me one of his Fords, a brand new one (more or less, a
salesman had used it). When my credit was checked, Jean’s fraud
was discovered. The success of what she had done made have been
assisted because Mama’s name was Ella Lewis and she was
exceedingly punctilious in paying her debts. Ella Jean sent me
some money and said she would take care of the problem. Maybe she
did, maybe she didn’t. It really didn’t matter ultimately, for
truly I was in her debt despite what she had done. She had been
kind to me. Very sweet. In a way, I betrayed her trust.

The last I heard from her she had married a
white man who worked at the same car plant that she worked. She
was a good woman. I didn’t do right by her and I am sorry about
it. So I wasn’t really sanctimonious about the problem with the
credit card. Maybe it was her way of paying me back, of getting
even, for all the problems I had put her through. She was just
someone looking for love, as they say, in all the wrong places.
That is the situation for most of us. I bought an Escort GT. I was
then thirty-nine. It was the first time I had ever bought anything
on credit.

My friends thought my going in debt would
stabilize me, pin me down to one place. Little did they know. I
had no intent to be bonded to anything other than righteousness. I
desired to be no man’s slave, no man’s flunky. It has always
been my personal ethic I would not do anything for money. I would
prefer to do without. As the blues man sang, I’ll sleep in a
hollow log, drink muddy water, before I let somebody make a fool
out of me. Fortunately, God has spared me that complication.

This book explodes several myths: that selling sex is completely different from any other kind of work, that migrants who sell sex are passive victims and that the multitude of people out to save them are without self-interest. Laura Agustín makes a passionate case against these stereotypes, arguing that the label 'trafficked' does not accurately describe migrants' lives and that the 'rescue industry' serves to disempower them. Based on extensive research amongst both migrants who sell sex and social helpers, Sex at the Margins provides a radically different analysis. Frequently, says Agustin, migrants make rational choices to travel and work in the sex industry, and although they are treated like a marginalised group they form part of the dynamic global economy. Both powerful and controversial, this book is essential reading for all those who want to understand the increasingly important relationship between sex markets, migration and the desire for social justice. "Sex at the Margins rips apart distinctions between migrants, service work and sexual labour and reveals the utter complexity of the contemporary sex industry. This book is set to be a trailblazer in the study of sexuality."—Lisa Adkins, University of London

On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.—WashingtonPost